1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless communication, and more particularly to integrated management of a plurality of servers that provide wireless services to clients.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless application protocol (WAP) is an application environment and a set of communication protocols for wireless devices which enables access to the Internet and advanced telephony services. WAP bridges the gap between the mobile world and the Internet as well as corporate intranets and offers the ability to deliver mobile value-added services to subscribers, independent of their network, bearer, and terminal. Mobile subscribers may access the same wealth of information from a pocket-sized device as they can from the desktop.
WAP is optimized for low-bandwidth, low-memory, and low-display capability environments. These types of environments include PDAs, wireless phones, pagers, and virtually any other communications device.
WAP is a global standard and is not controlled by any single company. Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, and Phone.com (formerly Unwired Planet) founded the WAP Forum in the summer of 1997 with the initial purpose of defining an industry-wide specification for developing applications over wireless communications networks. The WAP specifications define a set of protocols in application, session, transaction, security, and transport layers, which enable operators, manufacturers, and applications providers to meet the challenges in advanced wireless service differentiation and fast/flexible service creation. Since the WAP Forum was founded, hundreds of member companies have joined. The newer members of the WAP Forum represent a wide range of segments of the wireless communication industry, including: terminal and infrastructure manufacturers, operators, carriers, service providers, software houses, content providers, and companies developing services and applications for mobile devices.
According to the WAP Forum, the goals of WAP are to be: (1) independent of wireless network standard; (2) open to all; (3) proposed to the appropriate standards bodies; (4) scalable across transport options; (5) scalable across device types; (6) extensible over time to new networks and transports. As part of the Forum's goals, WAP will also be accessible to (but not limited to) the following: GSM-900, GSM-1800, GSM-1900, CDMA IS-95, TDMA IS-136, 3G systems-IMT-2000, UMTS, W-CDMA, Wideband IS-95.
WAP client applications make requests very similar in concept to the URL concept in use on the Web. A WAP request is routed through a WAP gateway which acts as an intermediary between the “bearer” used by the client (GSM, CDMA, TDMA, etc.) and the computing network that the WAP gateway resides on (TCP/IP in most cases). The gateway then processes the request, retrieves contents or calls CGI scripts, Java servlets, or some other dynamic mechanism, then formats data for return to the client. This data is formatted as WML (Wireless Markup Language), a markup language based directly on XML (Extensible Markup Language). Once the WML has been prepared (known as a deck), the gateway then sends the completed request back (in binary form due to bandwidth restrictions) to the client for display and/or processing. The client retrieves the first card off of the deck and displays it on the monitor.
The deck of cards metaphor is designed specifically to take advantage of small display areas on handheld devices. Instead of continually requesting and retrieving cards (the WAP equivalent of HTML pages), each client request results in the retrieval of a deck of one or more cards. The client device may employ logic via embedded WMLScript (the WAP equivalent of client-side JavaScript) for intelligently processing these cards and the resultant user inputs.
It is vital for organizations with deployed WAP server technology to have the ability to easily and cost effectively monitor these systems. Globally, the volume of sales of all types of goods and services completed via e-commerce (electronic commerce) and m-commerce (mobile-commerce) is on the rise, and is expected to continue to grow. Similarly, an increasing number of mobile devices (e.g., mobile phones, pagers, PDAs) are web-enabled, thus the demand for seamless, reliable WAP Server service is crucial to the success of any organization wishing to stake their claim in this growing industry.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a system and method for WAP server management using a single console to integrate management of a plurality of servers for wireless communication.